Searching for Solutions

Projects

Documenting the efforts of scientists, social innovators, agriculturalists, inventors, traditional and grassroots leaders, and other visionaries who are working on ways to sustain responsible growth and development while preserving diverse environments and cultures.

The series is also available in Spanish. If you’d like a copy of any of the stories, please send us a note.

Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.

Legend has it in the third century BC, the Greek scientist Archimedes devised a spectacular weapon to save the ancient city of Syracuse – a giant concave mirror that bounced concentrated sunbeams onto the sails of invading roman ships. The sails caught fire, the ships sank, and Syracuse was saved. This may have been the only time the sun was harnessed to wage war.

But now, in the heart of the Middle East, the sun is a player in the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Some say the sun will soon be harnessed in the service of peace. Others wonder if the peace process itself will undermine the prospects for developing clean solar power at a time when developing renewable energy is becoming more and more critical.

Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.

During the next 25 years, as developing nations like China and India industrialize, world energy consumption is expected to double. With oil and gas supplies diminishing even faster, many scientists believe that hydrogen – the most abundant element, comprising three-fourths of the mass of the universe – will be the energy carrier for the future.

Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.

City officials from throughout Latin America come to Curitiba, Brazil, to learn about low-cost, environmentally sound planning from urban planner Jaime Lerner.

The southern Brazilian city of Curitiba has the reputation for being the livable place in Latin America. With a population of a million and a half, Curitiba is known for its extensive parks, its efficient public transport system, an a highly successful recycling program.

The man largely responsible for Curitiba’s success is Jaime Lerner, the city’s three-time mayor and a pioneer of environmentally sound urban planning. Now, Lerner and his colleagues have set up a training center – the Jaime Lerner Institute – where Brazilian and other Latin American mayors and city officials can learn how Curitiba solved its problems, and how their cities might do the same.

In Israel, where developing alternative energy was always seen as a matter of survival, solar technology is pointing a way out of dependence on fossil fuels. Story produced in 1995.

Nearly everyone agrees that fossil fuels will run out someday – some say we’ll start feeling the pinch within 30 years.

Predictions of disastrous floods that global warming could bring to island nations like Japan, and to coastal areas of Europe and the United States, may force us to phase out petroleum-based fuels even faster.

If so, are clean, renewable alternatives really viable? And can they be developed in time?

In Israel, a Middle Eastern country with no oil or coal reserves, scientists have studied one option, solar energy, longer than anyone.

In northwestern Brazil, a controversial doctor is on a mission to lower birth rates.

In Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia, Dr. Elsimar Coutinho is on a mission to discover the perfect birth control method and bring down Brazil’s high birth rate. For over 30 years, he’s waged a one-man crusade to bring birth control to Bahia, in direct confrontation with the powerful Catholic Church.

With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the UN-funded Population Council, and the World Health Organization, Dr. Coutinho is internationally known for his pioneering research in hormonal birth control technologies. In Bahia, government officials and many health care experts credit Dr. Coutinho for single-handedly lowering the state’s birth rate.

Coutinho is beloved by hundreds of thousands of poor Brazilians who flock to him for advice about birth control. But he is vehemently criticized by women’s health advocates who say he is a sexist and a megalomaniac, more concerned with being an international star than with the well-being of his patients. Critics, including doctors and other health care professionals, say Dr. Coutinho is taking advantage of lax government regulations and using patients as guinea pigs for his research.

The cultural, religious, and social realities that stand in the way of lowering fertility rates in India are apparent in the tiny farming villages where one women’s group is trying to bring about change.

The cultural, religious, and social realities that stand in the way of lowering fertility rates in India are apparent in the tiny farming villages where one women’s group is trying to bring about change.

In India and Brazil, population control advocates have come into conflict with feminists over the contraceptive drug Norplant, considered by some to be among the most effective birth control methods available.

In India and Brazil, population control advocates have come into conflict with feminists over the contraceptive drug Norplant, considered by some to be among the most effective birth control methods available.

A group of Colombian visionaries has created a sustainable community in one of their country’s most inhospitable and dangerous places. This piece formed the basis of Alan’s award-winning book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.”

In the early 1970s, a group of South American visionaries realized that the coming population crisis would one day require people to live in places formerly considered unsuitable for human habitation. They decided that this was an opportunity to try to design a workable future, by and for the Third World, from limited resources.

The place they chose was on the desolate, barren plains of eastern Colombia, a country too often thought of as producing only coffee, cocaine, and bloodshed. The village they founded, called Gaviotas, has become a bright example of how to fashion an ideal tropical society.

Many of the ingenious, affordable technologies they’ve created have spread to other developing nations, and may have much to offer the developed world as well.

While German automakers race to produce the world’s first pollution-free, hydrogen-powered car, the world’s largest consumer market for automobiles, the U.S. remains stuck in a Faustian bargain with fossil fuels. From 1994.

The automobile is one of the miracles of the 20th century, giving us unprecedented freedom and power over time and space. But like the legendary Dr. Faustus, this power could one day turn on us, as the poisonous curses of pollution and global warming undermine the society that cars have made possible.

In Germany, where haze straight from hell or Los Angeles often chokes the Rhine valley and the autobahns, scientists and automakers have been racing to save us from this dilemma by designing a car that would run on pollution-free hydrogen.